Wedded By Steel
by GBscientist
Summary: Sam suffers from radiation poisoning after Mission City, but is there something more going on? SamxMikaela, adult themes.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers. I am only borrowing it.

**Bold** Cybertronian

_Italics_ Radio Transmission

* * *

I think the first time I noticed that anything was off was about a week after the battle at Mission City. Bumblebee took Mikaela and I to the lookout where we met Optimus, Ratchet, and Ironhide. Ratchet looked over Bumblebee's legs to make sure the welds and new wiring was knitting into properly and Ironhide went over Bee's weapons to make sure they were fully loaded and functioning okay. The Autobots talked for a bit about Cybertronian stuff that I didn't really pay attention to, and then all of them except Optimus folded back into their car forms. Optimus stayed in robot mode for a while to transmit some sort of beacon message off into deep space, so Mikaela and I sat on Bumblebee's hood and cuddled to pass the time.

Well, you know what happens with teenagers. Cuddling turned into a heavy MO session pretty fast, but it ended pretty fast too, when I just started coughing and tasted blood in my mouth. Ratchet scanned me immediately 'cause he was worried that I had a previously undetected cracked rib that had punctured my lung, but no such luck. He told me that I was showing some pretty severe cellular deterioration all over my body.

That got me thinking. Since the battle I had been nauseous and couldn't eat much. I was sleeping a lot, too. I thought it was nerves or PTSD. Something like that. Ratchet was convinced that I had radiation poisoning, probably from the Cube. He told me to go to the hospital immediately, so Bumblebee carted me off to the emergency room while Ratchet took Mikaela home.

Mom was so scared when I called her from the hospital payphone. Dad swore that he'd sue the pants off whatever was left of Sector 7. The doctor that looked me over had me admitted straight off. The nurses set me up with an IV drip with some glucose and sedatives, and I fell deeply asleep. The next morning, Lennox and Epps arrived to transfer me to a military hospital in Ratchet. Mikaela rode along with me and held my hand. The trip wore me out pretty thoroughly, and I dropped off again as soon as I was in my new room.

The next thing I remember really clearly was getting up to go to the bathroom. My legs would barely support me. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror because I didn't recognize my reflection. It was like the muscles were just melting off my face and all that was left was the skin and bones. My eyes just had no life in them. The worst part was when I ran my hand through my dry, flaky, hair. It just fell out. Not my hand, the hair. I struggled back to the bed and collapsed back to sleep.

For a while, life just blurred together. Wake up, try to eat, puke half of it up, fall asleep, repeat. Add coughing or puking up blood for entertainment every second time I woke up. The only good thing was that every time I woke up, Mikaela was there. Sometimes Mom popped in, but mostly she was too broken up to spend much time with me. They told me later that I was in and out like that for almost two weeks.

Then I started to get better. Nobody could explain why until they took a blood sample and found these little tetrahedron-shaped things with an extendable claw at each corner. Each one was about twice as big as a red blood cell and my blood was swarming with the little things. Mikaela told me that Ratchet said the little things were the Cybertronian equivalent of cells, so we called them cybercells. Nobody could figure out how they got into me, but they were multiplying. The doctors did an X-ray and found out that the cybercells had colonized my bone marrow and were showing up in patches of my muscles, too. I didn't complain much, since the little buggers seemed dead set on fixing up the damage the radiation did to me.

But then Mikaela got sick. I demanded to see her, and the doctors wouldn't let me until I threatened to walk there myself, no matter how many times I had to fall trying. Lennox took me over in a wheelchair. Mikaela looked as crappy as I did that time in the bathroom. She was gaunt and pale. I quietly called her name, and she looked at me and smiled weakly. She said that she wished she had some cybercells to fix her up before she fell back to sleep. All I could do was sit there, hold her hand, and stroke her head. Her hair fell out in my hand.

About a day later, the doctors pronounced that I was on the mend and they couldn't do any better than the cybercells already were, so they let me out. Then they wouldn't let me visit Mikaela. The theory they had was that I had been radioactive enough to poison Mikaela and that visiting her would only make it worse. I had a good shouting match with the doctors, but they posted a guard at her door. All I could do was look in the window of her room.

One day, on the way out of the hospital, I picked up a can of cola. I swear, it was the best tasting cola I had ever had, so when I got home, I poured myself a glass of the same brand out of the bottle. I figured the cybercells had actually found a way to make cola good, but the cola from the bottle still tasted normal. That gave me a weird, stupid, idea and I licked the can to test it. Yup, it was the can that tasted good, so I shrugged and ate it. For the first few bites, the metal tore up my mouth and made me bleed, but after that, the pain and bleeding just stopped. Don't ask me how. And don't ask me how I could suddenly chew aluminum either, because I don't know how the cybercells did it.

After that, I started swallowing any loose change I got like pills to keep the cravings for metal down. I mentioned it to Ratchet and he said that the cybercells had completely taken over my bone marrow and most of my muscles and were starting on my internal organs. I was scared out of my mind. My body was being taken over by tiny alien robots! I ran home from the lookout where Ratchet and I had been talking. Bumblebee followed me back home and said that I had run faster and longer than a human ought to be able to. I told him that was because I wasn't human anymore and he and his entire species could go to hell. At the time, I meant it, too.

I locked myself in my room and stayed there until the next evening. (It was about 10am when I locked myself in, by the way.) I did a lot of thinking while I was alone. I thought about how I never would have gotten to be with Mikaela without Bumblebee. I thought about how I had poisoned her, and how they had poisoned me. I thought about just ending it all, but I had to laugh when I realized that the stupid cybercells wouldn't let me die. I thought about how my hair still hadn't grown back.

Eventually, my thoughts came back to the family motto. No sacrifice, no victory. I came to the conclusion that a bigger victory needed a bigger sacrifice. It just sucked being the one making the sacrifice. I still didn't want to talk to anyone, though.

The thing that got me out of my room was Mom shouting that I had a phone call from Mikaela. I think I jumped down the whole flight of stairs in one leap. Mikaela said she had been released from hospital. Turns out she had developed some cybercells of her own. I asked her if the Autobots told her what was happening to me. I told her that the cybercells were taking over my body, and it would probably happen to her, too. She was silent for a while after that, but eventually said that meant we were stuck with each other. The point did make me smile. My first smile in days.

Things got back to sort of normal for a couple of weeks. I apologized to Bumblebee. I tried to shrug off my absence to Miles, but he accused me of being brainwashed by aliens. If only he knew. Mikaela wore a wig to school, since her hair hadn't grown back either. I wore a baseball cap in the classed where the teachers would let me get away with it. Apparently, hair was not a high on the cybercells' list of priorities.

Then I didn't wake up for five days. I was totally comatose, but my body was working fine. Mom freaked out, of course, and I woke up in the military hospital when it was over. Another X-ray and a scan from Ratchet agreed that while I was asleep, the cybercells had converted my brain and nerves. Yay (please note the sarcastic lack of enthusiasm there).

About two weeks after that came the last surprise. I woke up feeling like I was wearing a layer of rubber over my whole body, so I started to scratch at my face to get the mask off. Big mistake. The skin came off my fingers and face, first in flakes, then in chunks. The shock was so bad that I began to sob. Mom heard me and I warned her not to come in, but she did anyway. Big mistake. She ran screaming to her room and barricaded the door. I didn't blame her. I pulled on a balaclava and some gloves (which looked pretty stupid in the summer) and had Bumblebee drive me out to the Autobot base.

When we got there, Ratchet scanned me and confirmed my gut feeling. My entire body had been converted to cybercells. He helped me strip off my dead, useless, skin. Underneath my former scalp was a layer of triangular plates that pointed backwards toward my neck and lifted slightly off my robotic skull. So it turned out that the cybercells did care about my hair. Hah hah.

Then Ratchet and Bumblebee taught me the basics of being a Cybertronian. Things like how to activate my internal heads-up display and status readouts, what to eat (like what energon was), and how to go into recharge. I never thought that I would have to learn how to sleep.

Then I phoned Mikaela. She said I sounded different and I told her that was because I was calling on my internal comm. system. She was really quiet after that because she knew that meant I had turned completely into a Cybertronian. She knew that was going to be her soon, too. She went into her nerve-conversion coma that night.

After my change, I stayed at the base. There was no point in going home because I looked like a gunmetal grey mannequin, and I didn't want to freak out Mom or get shot at by Dad. I helped out where I could and took some military training from Lennox and Epps, who had some trouble getting used to my new look. To be honest, I had some trouble getting used to it, too. There were several times that I jumped when I looked in a mirror.

Mikaela didn't come to visit the base, but about two weeks after she got out of her coma, she called Ratchet, freaking out that her skin was falling off. I pulled on some pants, a jacked, gloves, shoes, and that stupid balaclava and sped off in Bumblebee to pick her up. I found her in the shed behind her house, huddled in a ball and trying to hide the spots where she had scratched off the dead skin. I carried her back to Bumblebee and we took her back to the base. Ratchet ordered me out of the med bay and wouldn't let me back in until Mikaela was 'adjusted' to her new appearance.

It took days. But when she was finally ready to let me see her, it was worth the wait. Somehow, despite being the same dull, unadorned, metal colour that I was, she was gorgeous. Her hair had been replaced by black wires that moved on command. She was really shy and fragile about it, but I told her really quietly that I thought she was more beautiful than ever. She said thank you. I kissed her lightly on the cheek and she smiled weakly back. Then I just sat, holding her, for a long time.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers. I am only borrowing it.

**Bold** Cybertronian

_Italics_ Radio Transmission

* * *

Ratchet found Mikaela and I sitting together and quietly talking, my arm stretched around her shoulders. He flicked my arm off her shoulders and said that there would be none of 'that' in his med bay. We had no idea what he was talking about, and our expressions said it eloquently. Ratchet sighed and started giving us 'the talk' from a Cybertornian standpoint.

Having the talk with your parents has nothing on the awkwardness of having the talk with a several million year-old Autobot medic. To really understand how robot sex works, you needed some background. Cybertronians were born with a spark, according to Ratchet that's some sort of standing energy wave. Anyway, the basic personality and abilities of a Cybertronian depended on the data that he or she started off with in their spark at 'birth'. After that, long-term memory was also stored in the spark. Short term memory was handled with magnetic drives, which humans reverse-engineered from Megatron to get computer hard disks. But we were talking about sparks, not hard drives.

So, where did a spark come from? Well, the AllSpark could create a spark and a whole body out of a lump of unrefined ore with enough of an energy input, but the more common way was for prospective parents to present the AllSpark with the shell they wanted their creation to inhabit, then the AllSpark would zap in a spark and there you go. Bob's your uncle.

On the other hand, the lineup at the AllSpark was horrendous after about two generations, so the Prime at the time had a new type of Cybertronian created. They were smaller, faster, more agile, used less energy, and had the built in capability to create new sparks when provided with a snippet of code from one of the older models. The new ones were called 'femmes' and the old ones got the old species name of 'mechs'. The addition of femmes to Cybertron allowed them to move away from the AllSpark and spread across the planet and colonize the rest of the solar system.

So, how did femmes get the data snippet, called an activation code, from a mech? That was why Ratchet flicked my arm off Mikaela's shoulder. It turned out that all Cybertronians, mech and femme, had a data port at the base of their neck and a jack in each wrist. To 'interface' a mech and femme would put their jacks in each others ports simultaneously. That lead to a temporary trade of spark data, including the activation code. When Ratchet saw my arm across Mikaela's shoulders, he thought I was waaaay to close to the data port for comfort. Hence the flicking.

So, I stupidly asked if that meant that I was a mech and Mikaela was a femme. Ratchet looked at me like I was the dumbest piece of pond scum ever to crawl out of the primordial slime. I took that as my indication that 'the talk' was over, so I suggested that Mikaela and I go to the rec. room that the other Autobots used most of the time and get something to eat. Mikaela admitted to feeling hungry, but she was really shy about running around 'naked'. I had to admit that the unpainted metal look was kind of revealing, so I asked Ratchet if we could get an alternate form and some armour. He said that for whatever reason the cybercells didn't give us the capability to transform, but if we ever decided to upgrade into new bodies he would make sure that we could. One thing we could do, though, was get a paint job.

At this point I should mention that while Mikaela and I were getting rebuilt from the inside out, a few more Autobots had landed. One of them was a narcissistic ass hole named Sunstreaker, who just happened to be a painter and his favourite canvas was unarmoured protoforms. When we asked Sunstreaker to paint us, he said he would work it into his schedule, but the way his eyes lit up, you could tell he was ecstatic. He worked us in within about four hours of us asking.

Standing still while being painted was a complete pain. Being a total ass hole, Sunstreaker was not only a perfectionist, but he tended to yell when I twitched and messed up his stroke. Still, the abuse was worth it because Sunstreaker did an awesome job. I ended up with a blue base coat with black highlights. My hair plates were something he took special care with because they were mostly blue, but the edges of each plate were black. It looked sweet. Then it was Mikaela's turn. Sunstreaker locked me in a closet so that I couldn't see Mikaela as a work in progress and I couldn't ruin his unveiling by showing myself off. I told you he was a total ass hole.

When he was done, Sunstreaker grabbed me out of the closet and carried me to the rec. room, where he placed Mikaela and me on a table so everyone could see his genius. Everyone was pretty impressed with my paint job, but I was totally blown away by Mikaela's. She had a black base coat with orange highlights and the tips of her hair wires had all been dipped in the orange paint, too. When I held Mikaela's hand Sunstreaker looked like he was about to blow a gasket. He warned us that if we scratched his beautiful artwork, he would personally rip us to little bits, even if Mikaela was the first femme he'd seen in two million years.

Dropping that news bomb silenced the whole room. Apparently, Sunstreaker had let slip a bit of information that Mikaela wasn't supposed to have, just yet. Optimus asked us to come to his office so he could explain in private. We followed him, wondering what horrible fate awaited us. Optimus put us on his desk and handed us a pair of folding deck chairs to sit on before sitting down, himself. He explained that Megatron's desire for the AllSpark had included wanting to control exactly what sort of Cybertronians were created. He thought that femmes ability to create sparks was an abomination and that they were otherwise weak and useless, so he made it a standing order for the Decepticons to exterminate any femme they found. For the last two million years, nobody had seen any femmes. He had kept the information quiet so that Mikaela wouldn't be terrorized or feel pressured. Mikaela said that she wanted to go think about things alone, and Optimus helped her down.

I excused myself shortly after that and went to Mikaela's newly-assigned quarters. She was collected enough to let me in, but when I sat down beside her on the bed, she slid away. I asked her if she wanted to talk about what she was thinking right now. She said that she didn't want to end up as an Autobot baby factory. She wanted to do things, to help out in an active and tangible way, not stay 'barefoot and pregnant'. She knew that if she was the only femme, she would be locked away for her own protection because she was simply too valuable. I assured her that Optimus would never lock her up, never make her the brood mare of the Autobots. I also made a silent vow to myself that I wouldn't fail her, even if he did. Then I was able to lighten the mood by pointing out that we were still infants by Cybertronian standards, so she had plenty of time for other femmes to show up before anybody would even _think_ of hitting on her. That got a smile out of her and she was able to sleep that night.

We slid into a sort of routine after that. I got lessons on human and Autobot military tactics from Lennox and Ironhide, and Mikaela became Ratchet's new apprentice. It turned out that, historically, femmes had done most of the repair work because their fingers were smaller and more nimble than mechs'. Mikaela's knowledge of cars gave her a running head-start with her training, but I was hopelessly out of my depth with military stuff. Even as a robot I tripped over my own feet, and super-strength is totally useless when you end up punching yourself in the head. Twice. In a row. Finally, Ironhide grudgingly admitted that I had passed basic Autobot standards and was free to find another specialty, since I obviously wasn't cut out to be a front-line soldier.

There was one Autobot that thought I might be useful, though. Smokescreen was an offensive tactician by trade, but his real love was the subtle art of deception. His personal ethics were said to skirt the edge of Autobot morality, but he saw a use in my knowledge of human culture and resources and my fast tongue (often faster than my brain), so Optimus assigned me to help him negotiate the purchase of the resources needed to build the base, and any other scientific side-projects the Autobots might decide to dabble in. And I did a pretty good job of it, thanks very much. Smokescreen said I had the makings of a damn good quartermaster.

Then my evolving new life was shattered, again. A pair of armoured bank trucks showed up one day and Smokescreen went to meet them because he was expecting a shipment of some rather expensive rare metals for Wheeljack, the engineer. Once he got near the trucks they transformed into a pair of identical one-eyed Decepticon assault drones that started to rip him limb from limb. The master of deception got deceived. Mikaela had gotten a break from her work in the med bay and we were spending it outside, so we saw the attack start. I sounded the alarm and we ran to the armoury, what for I don't know, we were both lousy shots. Once we got there, Mikaela shouted at me to grab as many one-shot missile launchers as I could carry and get them to Lennox on the roof. She started grabbing grenades with her hair wires and missiles in her arms. We each were able to get about 8 missiles up to Lennox and Epps, who used them to get the attention of the attack drones away from Smokescreen. Then the real attack arrived.

A Decepticon jet that I had never seen before came screaming along the ground at tree-top height before transforming into a tank mid-air and smashing into Ironhide at high speed. Lennox said something about always having to deal with Decepticon tanks. Mikaela grabbed a thermite grenade in each hand and used her hair to pull the pins before chucking the grenades at one of the drones and dropping the bastard. With Ironhide out, Sunstreaker and his less abrasive twin Sideswipe were the heavy hitters, but they specialized in close-in work. Bluestreak, the sniper, distracted the jet-tank long enough for the twins to speed up in their Lambourghini alternate forms and jump the jet-tank, who immediately transformed into his primary robot mode (his _third_ for those keeping track). The twins were able to lay enough hits to convince the Decepticon to back off, so he transformed back into his jet mode and turned tail.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped paying attention to the other drone, which was not a good idea. It snuck up behind us somehow and smashed the building out from underneath Mikaela, who it had assigned as the primary threat. It grabbed her out of the rubble and was about to crush her to death when Bumblebee leapt on its back and blew its ugly one-eyed head off. I got to the dead drone as fast as I could run and peeled its hand open to free Mikaela. She grabbed onto me like she was in danger of being swept away by a hurricane, or something, and we just stood there for almost 10 minutes. Not getting leg cramps is a great part of being a robot.

Ratchet had his hands full after the battle. Smokescreen was a mess. He needed all of his limbs re-attached and most of his torso armour replaced. Ironhide was even worse off because his torso was caved in from the jet-tank's impact, which was putting too much pressure on his spark casing. So, after stabilizing Smokescreen (but before putting any limbs back on), Ratchet had to cut the front off of Ironhide's torso. It wasn't pretty. They both survived, but they were out of action for weeks afterwards.

Mikaela ended up with her first patient, too. Sunstreaker got his armour scuffed and was too impatient to let his cybercells fix it up, so he demanded immediate medical attention. Ratchet knocked him out with a wrench to the head and then instructed Mikaela in the finder points of sending specific instructions to another Cybertronian's self-repair system. In this case, the instruction was to repair the armour scuff, but to change the colour of Sunstreaker's armour from blinding yellow to hot pink.


End file.
